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In a series of witty punchlines, Patrick Chappatte makes a poignant case for the power of the humble cartoon. His projects in Lebanon, West Africa and Gaza show how, in the right hands, the pencil can illuminate serious issues and bring the most unlikely people together.

300 million are photos taken each day generating over 100 billion a year. While 20 years ago 10% of photographs made were printed, today less than 1/10 of 1% are ever printed! Historically, what’s printed lasts; what’s not, doesn’t. Has this changed?

Since it’s invention, photography has played an important role in history. It not only records history, it also has its own history. America knows itself in part through photographs. So what are the most important American photographs?

Continuity. Every screenwriter needs to create it. Every storyboard needs to interpret it. Every director needs to guide it. Every editor needs to refine it. If you’re a still photographer, you may be called to do all of these things.

Continuity lies at the heart of the art of storytelling. The types of images selected and the transitions made between images presented in groups can be powerful tools for visual communication. Sequences can provide useful comparisons and contrasts between separate images and their contents. They set a pace and rhythm for looking. Carefully orchestrated they can create the illusion of moving in time forward or backward, linearly or non-linearly. They can be used in extremely creative ways. The best sequences make images clearer, more meaningful, and more moving.

Photographers can use continuity to guide and structure initial explorations on site; use a storyboard as a checklist to make sure no angle goes uncovered. Photographers can use continuity to find missing gaps or resolve challenging transitions in ongoing projects; update a storyboard and find the out what you’ve got too much of and what you don’t have enough of or find a bridges to connect disparate images. Photographers can use continuity to edit, sequence, and present existing work more effectively; fine tune a story in sophisticated and compelling ways; there are many possible solutions.

There are many classic strategies for sequencing images and creating transitions between them.

Persistence
Pans
Zooms
Fades
Numbers
Cuts

Include continuity in your work and you’ll find you’ll be able to solve many more visual challenges in many more ways and make the reception of your work more effective and powerfully felt. Once you understand what the many possibilities are and how they work, you can be extremely creative with them. Some artists have even been celebrated more for their use of continuity than their singular images. Continuity is so powerful that it can be an art in and of itself.

Some noise is random; some noise is fixed. Hot-pixel noise is fixed. What are “hot pixels”? Photosites on digital sensors that generate brighter information faster than their neighbors. Hot pixels get brighter at higher ISOs, with longer exposures, and in warmer temperatures. You can map where hot pixels are and exactly how bright they get under specific conditions with a dark slide. Then you can use a dark slide to drop out fixed “hot-pixel” noise with a simple postprocessing technique in Photoshop.

To make a dark slide, simply make a separate exposure made at the same ISO, exposure time and temperature as the image you intend to use it with. Exposure of what? Darkness. Leave your lens cap on.

To use a dark slide in Photoshop, open the dark slide and the image you’d like to use it with and drag and drop the dark slide into that image file, holding the Shift key to make sure it’s precisely registered (wait to crop or rotate an image until after this is accomplished). Change the blend mode of the dark-slide layer to Difference and watch the hot-pixel noise vanish.